Twitter breaks off just before Nintendo Direct, chaos follows

Updated: 2/8/2023 5:58 PM ET: Twitter seems to be back to normal.

Just before the Nintendo Direct begins on February 8th at 5pm ET, Twitter collapsed – nobody could send tweets. At the time of writing it is still broken.

Every user, regardless of their issue, seems to get an error message when trying to send tweets that reads, “You have exceeded the daily limit.” Clicking the link presented below the error takes you to a Twitter Help Post about current Twitter limits, which include 500 DMs per day and 2,400 tweets—a limit most of us don’t come within a country mile of. It’s clearly not that we’ve hit all of those daily limits, it’s that something is broken at Twitter headquarters. It certainly seems like the collapse of sending tweets is related to the release of its new feature: 4,000 character tweets, which nobody asked for and which debuted a few hours before it all went haywire. Also, retweets and quote tweets appear to be broken at the time of publication.

Currently the only workaround to upload tweets is to schedule them.

Funnily enough, just before the much-anticipated Nintendo Direct began, Twitter collapsed, breaking the storied tradition of games having Twitter live-tweeting every moment of the stream. What would we call this Direct “Mid” if we couldn’t do it on Twitter just seconds into the show?

Of course, we all handled it with aplomb and decency, though planning your scathing comment is so much less satisfying than typing “GameBoy Advance games are the highlight lol” and hitting send. It’s also hard to tell if you actually tweeted a Fire because no one can agree. REST IN PEACE.

We can all still take to Twitter to share our excitement, frustration, or disappointment (as made clear above), but it’s unclear when Twitter will be back to normal. For now, schedule your hot takes a minute later than when you have them!